01/28/07

Running silently:

I spent most of the last week flying, and the 170 has been a valiant companion while on the road. I managed a good amount of Pascal programming - writing simple programs that do nothing much in particular - but it does allow me to pass the time in a hotel room. The Web is greatly missed though. I have a good number of applications on my Powerbook, but after some time I become bored. With the Web, there's always something else to do. This isn't such a bad thing though - it gets me outside.

Now I'm back at home, and I decided to do something a little different with my IIsi. Many moons ago, I wrote an article on LowEndMac about silent computing. I've always had a thing for working on a computer in silence - no fans, no whirring of the hard drive - just the tapping of the keyboard and the clicking of the mouse. For the article, I worked with a dual floppied LC running 6.0.8. and enjoyed the experience. Yes, there is risk in disabling the fan, but a hard drive generates most of the heat anyway, and the LC ran continuously without complaint. I know the IIsi isn't an LC, but the plan was to pull the hard drive, disable the fan, and run it with just the internal and external floppy drive. The IIsi runs cool to begin with, so I didn't think the missing fan would be an issue.

So here I am, and so far so good. I have a stripped down version of 6.0.8 on the internal drive, complete with TCP/IP functionality. I'm typing this using TeachText, since I don't have space for a full featured word processor beyond MacWrite. I'll have to hunt something down with at least a spell checker that will fit on a floppy. Nonetheless, it's pretty cool to work without any white noise from fans and hard drives. And hey, I can still use Telnet and FTP!